Within modem telephone networks, various automated caller-accessible services have long been available. These have included services facilitating the automated placing of credit and collect calls, services allowing a caller to place a three-party conference call, as well as caller-specific speed dialing services. Such automated services are heavily relied upon by business travelers who often find it essential to quickly place calls from locations outside of their home or office. As almost all businesses have become increasingly globalized, easy access to such automated services from within more than one country or region has become a necessity for more and more business travelers.
While automated caller-accessible services have been offered by various telephone service providers worldwide, many of these services fail to address non-native users in a language which they can readily understand, fail to accept instructions from such users in a language which they speak, fail to provide a consistent means by which the services can be accessed from one country to another, and/or fail to provide access to the same array of services from one country to another. This has left the international business traveler without a simple, consistent and reliable means of accessing needed telecommunication services regardless of the particular country which that traveler happens to be telephoning to or from.